The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Making SAARC meaningful
Rooting out terror is imperative

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram is known for speaking out his mind so it should come as no surprise that in a veiled attack on Pakistan, he emphasized at the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) interior ministers’ conference in Thimpu on Saturday that no country could escape its responsibility by blaming non-state actors for terrorist activities emanating from its soil. His statement that as long as the territory of a country is used by non-state actors to prepare for terror attacks, that country owes a legal and moral responsibility to its neighbours and to the world to suppress those non-state actors and bring them to justice, is unexceptionable. It is not as though India has not said this in the past, but its reiteration was necessary to send out the right signals in the wake of the new terror attacks in Mumbai.

It is no secret that despite all that Pakistan may say, recruitment centres and training camps for terrorists continue to operate from Pakistani soil and parts of the establishment tend to provide sanctuaries to such elements. For an affected country like India, it is immaterial whether it is State actors or non-State actors that provide the means for such activities. The responsibility rests with Pakistan to ensure that punitive action is taken to stop such nefarious activities on their soil. Indeed, Chidambaram’s observation that South Asia was perhaps the most troubled and vulnerable region in the world as the vast majority of terrorist incidents this year — as well as last year — occurred there, bares why the SAARC has failed as an effective regional forum where forums like the European Community, the Association of South East Asian Nations and the Asia Pacific Economic Forum have succeeded in significant measure.

Clearly, so long as the terror threat persists, the benefits of SAARC, be they in terms of greater regional connectivity, better transport infrastructure and enhanced flow of material and goods, would continue to be of very limited value. It is therefore imperative that the forum works to its full potential while removing the impediments in its way.

The message from Oslo
Lowering guard has proved costly

Only a few days after the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai terrorists have struck at Oslo, the Norwegian capital, well known for its role in brokering peace in Sri Lanka, West Asia and elsewhere. Those behind the terrorist killings in the two cities, far away from each other, may not be members of the same group, but they are believers in the same negative ideology. Terrorists struck on Friday at two places in Oslo — a building complex housing the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office and at a summer camp in the island of Utoya — leading to the death of 80 people. Those attending the camp were young members of the ruling Labour Party. The exact motive of the terrorists may be found out after the investigations are over. Thorough questioning of the person arrested immediately after the two incidents may provide significant details about the outfits involved.

Two groups have claimed responsibility for the Oslo killings — the Ansar al-Jihad al-Islami or the Helpers of the Global Jihad and the Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish outfit — but they may not be the real culprits. As some counter-terrorism experts have warned, making claims by these outfits may be aimed at confusing the investigators. No one is sure if these groups really exist. It is strongly believed that what happened in Oslo is the handiwork of homegrown terrorists. If this is true, then Friday’s attacks need to be taken with greater seriousness. This will mean that Al-Qaida and its associates have made inroads in the local population of the countries and cities on their radar screen. But it is all confusion at this stage. Significantly, Muslim leaders of Norway have condemned the Oslo killings.

Terrorists have been striking at different places in Europe after the 7/7 attack in London. They targeted Sweden in December 2010. Denmark had been receiving threats after a newspaper published cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2005. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has taken over as Al-Qaida head after Osama bin Laden’s death, threatened to hit Norway after it supported the US-led NATO operations in Afghanistan. It seems the Norwegian authorities did not take Zawahiri’s words as seriously as they ought to have. Lowering their guard has proved very costly to them.

Thought for the Day

Life can be easy, it is only a question of choosing between solutions and illusions. — Didier D’haese

ARTICLE

Cementing strategic ties
US and India need to get serious
by Harsh V. Pant

At a time of growing concerns about India-US relations, the second annual strategic dialogue between the two sides was held in New Delhi last week. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in India in part to restore the lustre that seems to have disappeared from the India-US ties and in part to remove doubts about America’s support for India’s core concerns. The much-hyped visit by President Barack Obama to India last November today seems a distant memory, as New Delhi and Washington have been struggling to give substance to a relationship that seems to be losing traction over the last few months in the absence of a single defining idea.

A range of issues, including terrorism, the Af-Pak situation, nuclear cooperation and India’s role in the Asia-Pacific, were on the agenda for the latest round of the strategic dialogue. On terrorism, Mrs Clinton promised to lean “hard” on Pakistan, reiterating that the US has made it clear to the Pakistan government that “confronting violent extremism of all sorts is in its interest.” She went on to underline that the US did not “believe that there are any terrorists who should be given safe havens and free pass by any government.”

Though Mrs Clinton maintained that the US remains “fully” committed to the civilian nuclear pact with India, she made it clear that there were “issues” which required to be resolved by India and the US in the civil nuclear field without going into the specifics.

More significant was her speech in Chennai where she asked India to exercise political influence in consonance with its growing economic weight in the international system. Exhorting India “to lead,” she asked New Delhi to do more to integrate economically with neighbours like Afghanistan and Pakistan and to take a more assertive role in the Asia-Pacific.

There is growing frustration in Washington about India’s inability to take a leadership role either in its immediate neighbourhood or in its extended periphery. As the situation in Afghanistan has unravelled and as China’s rise has upended the balance of power in East Asia, there was an expectation that India would be a valuable partner in bringing some semblance of stability in these regions. But India has failed to articulate a coherent policy response to these fundamental challenges to its own and regional security.

Meanwhile, many in New Delhi have argued that there have been contradictory signals from the Obama Administration on Pakistan and China, two core Indian security concerns. Despite sharing a broad convergence of interests with India, the US has been reluctant to acknowledge India’s role in Af-Pak. During the latest visit too, Mrs Clinton made it clear that there were limits to what the US can do to influence Pakistan’s policy vis-à-vis terrorism and extremism.

The US has been reluctant to support a higher profile for India in Afghanistan even as many in India want to expand New Delhi’s security footprint in that country. As the Obama Administration’s plans to end the combat role of American military in Afghanistan by 2014 have become more concrete, the choices for India are getting limited, especially as there has been little change in the mindset of the Pakistani security apparatus that having a pliable government is crucial in order to have a strategic depth vis-à-vis India.

Meanwhile, the last big idea that transformed the nature of the India-US ties under the Bush Administration is also facing setbacks. A few weeks back at its 2011 plenary meeting in the Netherlands, the 46-nation nuclear cartel, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), came up with new guidelines regarding the tightening of exports of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technologies. Though the exact formulation of the new guidelines have not been made public, they seem to underscore that the transfer of sensitive ENR technologies will exclude nations which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and do not have full-scope safeguards. This has led to an intense debate in India as it seems to go against the spirit of the NSG exemption granted in 2008. In an unprecedented move, the NSG gave a crucial waiver to New Delhi, enabling it to carry out nuclear commerce, and ended 34 years of India’s isolation from international mainstream in the wake of the 1974 nuclear tests.

But the Obama Administration’s ideological rigidity on non-proliferation is showing signs of destroying the hard won gains from the nuclear rapprochement between India and the US. The Obama Administration’s support for the new ENR guidelines also stems from its ideological commitment to the extant nuclear non-proliferation regime. Successive US Administrations have viewed nuclear proliferation as the biggest threat to the American and global security, but unlike its predecessor the present dispensation in Washington DC believes that the regime framework needs to be strengthened to counter the proliferation threat. Mrs Clinton’s latest visit has failed to allay Indian concerns fully.

The two governments in New Delhi and Washington DC are, for different reasons, constrained from taking their bilateral relationship any further. Both are consumed by domestic challenges. As a consequence, the last two years have witnessed a lot of rhetoric but very little substantive movement. Today there is no big defining idea in the relationship and even the nuclear deal which got both bureaucracies united for some time is facing critical issues. In the short-to-medium term, the India-US relationship will remain circumscribed. On the nuclear deal, New Delhi cannot give Washington DC what it wants, and on Af-Pak, Washington DC can’t deliver what India wants. India can indeed be an important partner of the US in managing the changing strategic landscape in Af-Pak and the Asia-Pacific. But to achieve the full potential of such a partnership, the US will have to acknowledge Indian security interests and India will have to take a leadership role.

MIDDLE

Double standards
by K.R. Bharti

I received an invitation. It was from the department of public relations. Of various programmes structured and scheduled for pushing the nasha nivaran campaign (prohibition) in the district by the department, a kavi sammelan was the one to which I was invited as a poet. The instruction contained in the invitation letter was that the poem to be recited on the day should be directed against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc for which a remuneration of Rs 50 would be given.

The remuneration was small but the honour was great. On turning home after office hours that evening, I set to write a poem on the given theme. I was virtually lost in choosing and knitting words for hours and yet no poem worthwhile in my own assessment came forth. Tired as I was, I made up my mind to scribble it fresh, next morning.

Hardly had I dropped my pen on the table when there was a frantic call. It was an Assistant Excise Taxation Commissioner on the other end: “Sir, liquor vends of our district will be put to auction day after tomorrow. Please do grace the occasion,” he entreated.

“What double standards!” I wondered. One department warns against alcoholic beverages, the other endeavours to boost them. This paradox of policies struck the right cord in me. The poem, which was eluding me thus far, was now standing before me with its open arms.

Ready with the poem on this duality of system, I reached the venue in time on the stipulated day when 20 poets had arrived. The programme had just started when a few more poets barged in, chewing and swallowing pan (betel leaves). It was transparently clear from their body language that they were drunk and in an almost inebriated condition. My expectation that the poets to speak on the occasion would be teetotallers was belied. I tried to voice my concern to the fellow poets sitting on my either side but the pungent smell of smoke sneaking from their mouths repelled me from continuing any dialogue with them.

Anyhow, poets one after the other began to recite their poems condemning the use of alcohol and other intoxicants and drew their due pat. Strangely, the drunken poets breathed all the more fire against alcohol and won thunderous applause. Buoyant with the cheers and the spirit (alcohol) they kept thrusting poem after poem on the audience.

When it was time for dispersal after the function was over, two poets requested me for a lift. On the way, the duo requested for a small stopover near the liquor vend and bought a bottle of liquor as also some packets of cigarettes from a nearby panwari shop.

“But sir, today you sounded so furious against all these intoxicating substances in the kavi sammelan and now you...”, I had the temerity to point out.

“What you saw and heard was for people’s consumption only. To be frank, we cannot write and recite anything worthwhile without a puff and a peg. And this history of hypocrisy is not recent one. Don’t you know our religious texts teach and preach abstinence and yet there are references galore of gods indulging in the intoxicants like Somrus (divine liquor), Bhang (cannabis), Dhatura (belladonna), etc? Prohibition has failed miserably whenever and wherever enforced,” they argued.

I reached home midnight with diffident mind whether the nasha nivaran campaign (prohibition) will ever succeed! Perhaps it finds place in poetry only — nay — even poetry sings praise of sharab (liquor) more than denouncing it.

OPED ECONOMY

The Euro could be the undoing of all that unites Europe
A common currency, the Euro, does not seem to have brought countries in the European Union closer. Bailing out Greece last week from a debt crisis did little to dispel misgivings that worse is to follow.
Philip Hensher

What makes us European? Is it our shared culture? Is it our shared system of values? Or is it our money? What happens when a Spaniard and a Swede bump into each other, assuming they can find a common language? Do they agree to spend their money together? See that they’re living in the same sort of mental space where people’s lives and views are respected? Or just discover that they both just love German techno?

The German Chancellor (centre), The Prime Minister of Greece (left) and the French President (with his back to the camera) at a meeting to bail out Greece from a growing debt crisis. Photo Reuters

Or are they forever separated by the fact that they were born in different countries? It’s easy to think, as the European monetary project falters, that the things which bind Europeans together are less powerful than the ties of the nation state. It is certainly the case that, whenever a problem emerges, national media and politicians are quick to isolate domestic concerns and values from the concerns and values of the whole union.

It was apparent in a small, malevolent way with the outbreak of E.coli in Germany in June. Before the source was identified as locally grown bean sprouts, speculation pointed to Spanish vegetables. Only outside the EU, as Russia banned imports, did anyone seem to think of the source as European vegetables. Within the EU, the thinking was lucidly national: for the Germans, the Spanish were the source of poison; for the Spanish, the Germans were the source of national calumny.

That solved itself without lasting effects. But the disastrous state of European finances has produced national divisions which will last for generations. One patched-up solution to the Greek crisis came this week; others will no doubt follow. The interesting thing is that, while a European economy appears a single, committed project when things are on the up, when problems emerge, the economies become national once more.

Brotherhood

A shared coinage suddenly seems a weak bond between people who don’t have a language in common. What began as a brave partnership starts to look like an overambitious dog-walker’s outing, taking a Great Dane, a Rottweiler and a chihuahua out on the same lead. Hundreds of billions of euros have been provided to prop up the Greek economy, in one conciliatory phase after another, like a five-year-old’s tea. But the apparent willingness to hand over any amount of money has led to a distinct lack of Europe-wide brotherhood. John Lanchester summed it up well in his phrasing of a question increasingly asked in Germany: “Why [should] Germans work until 69 to fund the retirement of Greek public-sector workers who (supposedly) knock off at 55?”

Germans have, of course, been through this once in recent years. The events which led the former citizens of West Germany to labour in order to restructure the equally catastrophic economy of the former East were accepted with less complaint, as a national duty. It seems obvious that there is no comparable sense of European duty which would lead them, and us, to prop up the failing economies of our European partners. Is there, in reality, any European partnership at all?

There are three aspects to the European project. The first, of ultimate monetary union, appears fragile and with a doubtful future. The second is cultural, where de facto union, the free flow of ideas and ways of living, has been in process for centuries. The third is political in the broadest sense: the establishment of a shared political culture, of assumptions about rights, duties and democracy. That, too, has been a great success. From the point of view of the rest of the world, the political unity of European thinking has never been stronger.

That sounds unlikely, but think of the public values that are universal within Europe. Freedom of expression; legal rights; democracy; equality between the sexes; racial equality; freedom from torture and capital punishment. Some of these are better carried out than others, and better observed in some parts of Europe than in others, but they are all enshrined universally, and all originate in liberal European thinking. These things bind us together.

They are, too, values which precede the European Union by centuries, and which were propagated across Europe as easily as cultural phenomena. When Samuel Johnson remarked that Frederick II of Prussia was the only great king in Europe, or Voltaire wrote his admiring book on English political institutions and public life, these ideals were travelling from one end of Europe to another in almost imperceptible steps, like Brownian motion.

And it shouldn’t be forgotten that one of the primary motivations behind the euro project was to insulate and protect liberal political values. If countries were bonded through their currencies, there could be no danger of falling back into the illiberal public policies. Germany could be saved from itself; a Le Pen could, if the worst happened, be led by the nose.

Later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the prospect of euro membership could be held out before the countries of the New Europe, to lead them away from Soviet values. Just how potent is that promise? Well, Poland abolished the death penalty in 1998; Romania decriminalised homosexuality in 1994. And as for faith in the monetary mechanism to deliver liberal freedoms, Estonia joined the euro as recently as last January, with hardly a backward glance.

Unity and diversity

The discomfiting thing for the EU institutions now, however, is that European freedoms managed to spread and solidify, in the event, without any apparent help from a single currency. It was a word-of-mouth thing. Similarly, culture disseminated itself from Lisbon to the borders of the old Soviet Union, enabled by the dropping of barriers to trade and travel, but also driven by people’s desire to try the new things they were suddenly exposed to, to dance to a hit record, read that new book that everyone is talking about.

Food is much less locally distinctive now than it was 30 years ago, for both good and bad; give or take a local enthusiasm for the interval of the augmented second, so is music. In two out of three areas, Europe has achieved a unity and brotherhood beyond the wildest dreams of a generation ago. Some of that is down to the EU, the free transport of goods and services and, especially, the Schengen treaty. (Who would have dreamt, in 1989, that within a very few years you could travel from Spain to Hungary without showing your passport?) The spread and agreement on values might have happened anyway.

With the ill-tempered arguments among political leaders and the resentments over who pays for the Greek default, it might seem as if the mechanism intended to bring about social unity will be the unwitting means of undoing it. The euro is the product of a politician’s will; the force which, increasingly, gives an Italian and a Dane something in common is just something that has happened, like a change in the weather. And we all know which of the two is more powerful. But it is also true that the future of the EU lies in a million small personal encounters. If those, too, start to be inflected by debt and obligation, then the whole project is in trouble.

— The Independent

Europe takes over the debt of weaker countries
Sean O’Grady

The European project is much like riding a bicycle; the rider either pedals forward or falls over. The current sovereign debt crisis is forcing the pace of political integration in a way few thought possible.

Even Eurosceptics such as the Chancellor, George Osborne, now point towards far deeper co-operation and a European super-state in all but name as the “inexorable logic” of what is going on now.

The Tory attitude to Europe has basically gone through three stages. First there was Margaret Thatcher’s early insistence that the 1986 Delors plan for a single currency, and all that flowed from it, was just a bad idea for everyone, full stop and veto. Then along came John Major who said it might not be for us, but the rest could go ahead with our blessing. Now comes George Osborne screaming. “Faster! Faster!”

When that happens it will mean, for good or ill, that the UK will become even more distanced from the rest of the European Union, as more and more members join the single currency when they become ready. A two-speed Europe may soon become a reality, and in practical terms it will mean a large, potentially powerful economic entity that makes crucial decisions affecting our economic future but in which we have no vote, and perhaps not much influence. Whatever David Cameron wanted to say to our European partners at the emergency summit in Brussels he couldn’t because he wasn’t invited. As and when Europe returns to normality, that lack of influence and political imbalance may begin to grate.

At all events, Europe’s monetary union is, as the Treaty of Rome famously put it, becoming “ever closer”, as Germany and the other solvent nations begin to take on more and more of the debt of their weaker partners. Eventually, the eurozone may decide to pool or Europeanise its debts so there would no longer be Greek or Italian or Portuguese debts for the markets to attack but eurobonds, behind which stand all the governments and taxpayers of the eurozone.

That strongly implies some control at a European level of the growth of that Euro-debt. And that means controlling the difference between what governments tax and spend, that is, fiscal policy.

This may well be what President Sarkozy had in mind when he talks about “European economic governance” and the present bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, eventually becoming a European IMF, or EMF. He has in the past openly promoted the idea of a “European Treasury”. He has a point. As has been noted many times, and as we can now see from experience, monetary unions work best if they are accompanied by fiscal unions.

Britain and the Euro

The monetary union of the eurozone – the Euro single currency area – allowed member states too much leeway over their budget deficits, or fiscal policy – their tax and public-spending plans. Even though there were supposedly strict treaty criteria, these were sometimes ignored or fiddled and, when the financial crisis hit, the rulebook was chucked out the window.

Despite the dryness of the phrase, fiscal policy goes to the heart of nation’s politics – what should the level of public spending be? How should the nation pay for it? How much to borrow and how much tax to levy? Which taxes? Much of the detail of these things can be safely left to national finance ministers, but the overall level of public borrowings, and, in practical terms, what governments can realistically tax and spend, will rest with some centralised European treasury department.

A European finance minister will have to set the borrowing limits of individual nations, irrespective of national electorates’ views. He, or she, will have to determine where the structural funds in the EU be spent. The Euro-treasury will have to decide if the eurozone or the EU operates any longer with widely diverging rates of corporation and other taxes. He will have to levy fines on nations. He might even seize their assets and control their bank accounts. He would be a very important figure. Much more so than the Chancellor of the Exchequer... The debate about Britain joining the euro could start all over again.

— The Independent